


a breath exhaled

by everender



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 17:56:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15273075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everender/pseuds/everender
Summary: "She sounds so hopeful and there's something in her voice that Chewie tries not to notice."Snippets of Rey and Kylo Ren through Chewie's eyes. One-shot.





	a breath exhaled

They lift the cover on the floor and she is huddled there, mask over her face, with the Stormtrooper and a little droid that Chewie vaguely contemplates dismantling and smuggling for parts.

"I'm the pilot," she says.

 _That little thing?_ he thinks. He doesn't believe it but she turns out to be more than a pilot - a mechanic, a scavenger, a Jedi.

He still thinks that when he looks at her, sometimes, her brow now creased with a weariness she hadn't possessed that day, the hum of the Force around her, and the weight of an entire rebellion's hope on her.

How does she carry all of it, that little thing? It frightens him.

Chewie's seen his fair share of that kind of heaviness, but hasn't quite seen it fester in someone and fill their heart with lead the way it had to Kylo Ren.

 _To Ben,_ he corrects, and although he's never spoken the name aloud, the shape of it brings an ache. The son of Han Solo and Leia Organa, nephew of Luke Skywalker, grandson of Anakin Skywalker, last Prince of Alderaan. And the one that, in the end, mattered the most - grandson of Darth Vader.

It is a lonely thing, Chewie thinks, that the girl is simply Rey of Jakku. But he hopes it somehow betters her odds.

 

xxx

 

The first time she escapes from Kylo Ren, there is no time to breath. He watches her reunite with the Stormtrooper and wonders at how she still has love to give when she'd never received any. They race to set up the explosives. And then there is Han and Kylo Ren on the bridge, and the girl and the Stormtrooper somewhere above them. 

"I have to try, Chewie," Han says, and Chewie sees Han's heaviness: a pale, serious boy he never quite knew what to do with, a princess that he could never spend quite enough time with, a scared young teenager sent to atone for something he didn't quite understand.

Chewie has his bowcaster ready, held with tense fingers. He isn't Force-sensitive but he can feel that something is going to happen. He'd felt the same feeling when they'd stepped onto Cloud City and it had ended with Han frozen in carbonite, but this feels older. Like the beginnings for this could be traced back to when Han had been thrown to his death and instead managed to set them both free.

And then Han falls and Chewie screams something guttural and all he can see was red: the color of that damned boy's saber, blood, heart. Pulling the bowcaster's trigger is instinctual. Han had saved him, and Chewie could never let his killer walk free.

But he also remembers Ben Solo.

Leia was already so small, it had seemed ridiculous to Chewie that a human being could be even smaller, but she lay in a bed on Hanna City with a pale little baby clutched to her chest. Chewie had looked to Han and seen the anxiety that had plagued his expression for the past nine months solidify into something softer, calmer.

Chewie held the boy to soothe him and let his parents get a full night's sleep. He helped him take his first steps from Han towards Leia and ran after his babbling little form across Chandrila. He taught him to understand Shyriiwook right after he uttered his first word in Basic. He let him hold the bowcaster once he was big enough, even though he'd never even let Han touch it.

This is also instinctual: a shift in aim the width of one of baby Ben Solo's hands, and the shot hits his side and not his heart.

He triggers the detonator and the last thing he sees before visibility drops to nothing is Kylo Ren's gaze go to the girl's perch, and his slow stalk off the bridge. 

 

xxx

 

The second time she escapes Kylo Ren, she is bleeding and the Stormtrooper is unconscious and there is no Han, and Chewie doesn't quite know what to do with the two humans he suddenly finds in his care. But the girl is determined and helps Chewie carry the boy onto the  _Falcon_ and then onto a cot, even though he doesn't really need the help.

 _Did he hurt you?_ His words come out louder than necessary and she flinches a little. Chewie takes a breath and asks, gentler,  _Are you okay?_

"I'm fine," she says. She tries to smile. "You should've seen it, I left him unconscious."

_You -_

"I used the Force." In the bit of silence that follows, she adds, "I wouldn't have been able to defeat him if you hadn't landed that hit on him, though", and Chewie had feels a mixture of shame at shooting him and regret that he hadn't killed him.

 

xxx

 

He doesn't know where to go.

But he had been tied to Han and Han had been tied to the  _Falcon_ , and so when the girl needs to go to Ach-To, he leaves with her.

She is gifted, he concedes, as he watches her zip through setting controls. She smiles at him as they take off and he hopes they find his old friend.

He watches one of her lessons with Luke from afar for only a few minutes before he grows bored. He tilts his head and almost expects to hear Han grumble about Force mumbo-jumbo. He sits against the  _Falcon_ and watches the porgs to pass the time.

Every day, she comes to him afterwards, frustrated and seething. "I just don't understand," she says. "We need him. The galaxy needs him. His  _sister_ needs him!" Her voice becomes harder at the mention of Leia. She speaks of family with a distant sort of reverence.

She pretends her staff is a lightsaber as she swings it around to let off energy. Chewie can feel her itch to  _move_. She is strong and restless and her spirit reminds him of so many he knew before -  _Ahsoka, Qi'ra, Leia -_

 _(- Ben_.)

She starts sleeping less and Chewie can hear her talking to herself sometimes. A habit she picked up on Jakku, he thinks. But sometimes it's like she's having involved conversations with someone who he can't see, and she seems more lost than before. 

One day she storms back to the  _Falcon_  and asks, "Did you know that Ben destroyed the temple?"

 _Yes._ This seems to make her next words come faster.

"Did you know that Luke tried to kill him?"

_What?_

"He sensed the darkness inside Ben, and he just - he didn't even talk to him. He tried to kill him in his sleep." She is fuming, her eyes green with anger and confusion. Something softer, too. "He was his only family, and he tried to kill him." She pauses, catching the doubt in his expression. "It's the truth, Chewie."

Chewie lets his head drop so that the girl can't see his face.

Like so many times before, he tries to picture where they had been when Ben Solo became Kylo Ren. Leia in the senate of the New Republic, Han and himself on some Outer Rim planet to pick up a bet, and he now filled in the last person. Luke by Ben's bedside.

By the time he thinks to ask her how she knows all of that, she storms out into the rain.

 

xxx

 

"We're going to the  _Supremacy,_ " she says. She is soaked from head to toe but there is a hard determination in her eyes. The expression of someone who's found a solution.

 _No._ Chewie doesn't even care about where she got the idea or the context. He follows her as she strides across the Falcon, a trail of water in her wake.

"- doesn't believe me. But I saw the light inside Ben. It's still there." She's been talking the whole time, he suddenly realizes, and she referred to him as Ben. For the second time. "I can help turn him."

 _You sound crazy._ He knows he is too loud, too angry.

She stumbles a little but keeps walking towards the controls. "I believe in him."

 _You can talk to him_.

Two-hundred plus years, encounters with a dozen Jedi and Sith, and Chewie still doesn't understand the Force; but the sleepless nights, the talking to air, the way she walks like someone's always at her back makes sense now.

She pauses and looks at him. Her voice is suddenly small and Chewie has the distinct impression that Luke Skywalker just yelled at her. Or she yelled at him, or both.

"I didn't want to tell you. Or Luke." She speaks too fast and her pitch gets higher and higher. She won't meet his eye. "I thought it would just go away, and maybe if I said anything Luke would refuse to teach me but now he's told me to leave the planet anyway-"

Chewie lays a hand on her arm and he feels her startle.

_You've spoken to him?_

"Yes."

_You really believe he can be turned?_

"I do. There's so much conflict inside him. I think if I go to him, he might come back." She sounds so hopeful and there's something in her voice that Chewie tries not to notice. "He might be what helps us win."

_Let's go, then._

 

xxx

 

She comes back with two pieces of a lightsaber and a nasty gash on her arm. They both don't acknowledge what she doesn't bring.

"We need to move," she says. "The Resistance fleet is headed to Crait."

Chewie sets the coordinates.  _Did he hurt you?_ This conversation is becoming something of a pattern.

She tries to discreetly wipe away a tear and he pretends not to notice. His heart clenches and his fingers tighten on the steering. He should have went with her. His mind goes to his bowcaster. There's only the cut on her arm, but if Kylo Ren interrogated her again, laid a hand on her -

"He didn't hurt me." He glances over at her and her eyes are dry again. Quieter, she says, "He took me to Snoke and now Snoke's dead."

He sees the implication she is trying to sell and sees through it.

_You killed him?_

Whatever she tells him, he will take it as truth, but she says, haltingly, "No." He waits. "He killed Snoke. For me. But he still wouldn't come with me." He looks over at her again and she is biting the inside of her cheek.

They make the jump to hyperspace.

 

xxx

 

Afterwards, he watches her watch the Stormtrooper tuck a girl into bed. That soft thing in her eyes again; the longing.


End file.
